Posts

You could claim that poker is a card game, played between multiple players, including cards and chips and positions etc. But we are able to delve deeper than that. How do you describe the subjective structure of poker? For instance, say you had to describe poker to a Martian. You’d need to explain this card game to someone that doesn’t know what cards are, or that of a table is-and after all, those activities are only symbols.

A naïve perception of poker is going to be fixated at first glance of the game: the numbers on the cards, the suits, the felt table, the round chips. But those activities are incidental to poker. A game can be the same as poker that uses pebbles, or perhaps markings written down on paper, provided that it has sufficient rules. What’s important isn’t the cards. We wish to explore the relationships beneath the cards.

Poker players tend to be fond of describing poker almost like it were like chess. There are some more common metaphors, such as a gunfight or possibly a battleground, but I’ve found a chess match is the most popular.

What does it mean to consider poker as a chess match?

Describing poker like this suggests that poker is mechanistic. It shows that despite all the apparent randomness and luck involved, deep down it behaves deterministically-a game of real skill.

To consider randomness out of poker is to consider the mysticism out of it. Poker is often assumed is the game of gamblers, risk-takers, the steel-hearted and intuitively-minded. However when we call poker a chess match, we turn those logic around. Rather, poker is supposed to be analyzed, theorized about, dissected into its tiniest possible chunks then reassembled like a machine. It will become the domain of rationalists, mathematicians, and also cold strategists.

Poker players are trained to think this way. EV is the lens whereby they’re meant to see the world. They’re taught in which everything can be optimized, exploited, and divided into frequencies. It’s reassuring to think that, isn’t it? That underneath all the chaos, the whizzing cards and splashing chips, under each of the downswings and bad beats, the tilt as well as the frustrations, that all the way down inside the boiling heart of the thing, there is an equation or two that describes it all. Isn’t that the idea?

That in case you had but the time and mathematical power, you could fire up some equation or execute some algorithm that may “solve” it all for you? Needless to say, it’s well known that there are ways in which poker can be explained by math. But let’s think deeply concerning this. Why is this the way we are inclined to determine poker at the deepest level? Do you actually believe that’s how things work? Is learning poker the unveiling of a pristine, logical machine? Is poker a chess match?

You’ll believe that, distilled to its essence, poker is simply a mathematical system. You wouldn’t be alone in believing this way. Nearly all serious students of poker have learned to believe this, although not one of these has probably been told this outright. It is a type of ideas that is embedded in how we discuss poker; it is unconsciously absorbed, just like an element in the air. You might not know how or by which, but somehow it’s identified its way into your mind, and yes it makes perfect sense. Poker is a distinct system. A chess match. A collection of equations and matrices acting themselves out, again and again again.

You’re reading landing this website simply because you want to improve your skill on poker game.

I’m sure much too well how that goes. When I began poker, I had been constantly in search of the tricks the advantages were using to win, convinced they had to be stashed somewhere. I ripped through books like this one, hoping to uncover clever ways to play draws, tricky bluffs that nobody knew about, as well as secret to handling aggressive players or 3-bet pots. Deep-down, I hoped that some hand, theory, or concept would suddenly light up everything I couldn’t see.
However that moment of revelation never came. Along with time and experience, I discovered that this wasn’t for deficiency of trying. If there is a secret in poker, it is primarily the: the way is as hard, rigorous, and disenchanting since the way has ever been.

I’ve met and taught countless poker players during my time as a professional, and I have not met one whose game was transformed to a high level merely by reading a book. That’s just not the way in which poker works. You can look for books claiming to teach you things like this, but I suspect that, we have spent through them, you will find yourself right where you began.
The goal of this website, then, is not to help you better at poker. Instead, it is to help you a better poker player.
Exactly what do I’m talking about?

Someone once told me, “Nobody teaches us how you can be poker players.” We have been taught strategy, how to read hands, the way to size bets, but being a poker player requires in addition to that. Poker is undoubtedly an isolating and confusing profession. The minute you sit down at a poker table, you’re submerged in a profoundly backward and contrary culture.

I asked myself one fundamental question as i decided to write this website: if I could go back eight years, to when I was just beginning my exploration into poker, precisely what would I tell my 16-year-old self? What have I learned that he must know? What are the most valuable ideas that might equip him for the long and frustrating journey ahead? If you wish to better understand what {it indicates|it implies} to be a poker player, this website is for you.

You may not be prepared to absorb all of the ideas and points of views presented here. That’s okay. I wasn’t possibly the first time I heard them, and

I heard them often times from many different people before these folks were ingrained in me. Chances are it will need someone else, maybe a couple of years down the road, perhaps a friend, a mentor, a stranger indicating a similar thing before it convinces you. And who knows-some of those ideas could be wrong for you. That’s okay. It’s part of the process. But let this website be a part of your journey, and even if it doesn’t change your beliefs or your perspective on the world or on poker, trust that it’ll help, regardless of whether you agree with it. Trust that it has a place in your process.

I would like to remind you that the life as a poker player is a journey. Treating it as something less is a disservice to yourself. All that I write, I write since I want you to thrive and grow out of this journey.

Having said that, you don’t need to be a professional to understand the valuables in this website. It is written to be useful to all ranges of players, from high-stakes professionals to people just interested in learning the game.

What’s poker to you personally? Is it an interest? A hobby? A passion? Would it be your calling? Consider this. This is where it all begins.